Why do animals differ in their cognitive abilities? Some animals fail at apparently simple tasks, while others have a remarkable capacity to collect, retain, and use information from the environment to guide their behavior. Although paper wasps brains are smaller than a grain of rice, Elizabeth Tibbetts (University of Michigan) shows that wasps can perform seemingly complex behaviors like individual face recognition, transitive inference, social eavesdropping, and concept learning. She describes experiments that take advantage of natural variation in behavior within and among wasp species to test how social interactions shape cognitive abilities. This talk was given on Jan. 29, 2024 as part of the Group Dynamics Seminar series, considered one of the longest running seminar series in the social sciences. It has been running uninterruptedly since it was founded by Kurt Lewin in the 1920’s in Berlin. Since its establishment in 1948, the Research Center for Group Dynamics’ mission has been to advance the understanding of human behavior in social contexts. Learn more about RCGD and its interdisciplinary Group Dynamics seminars from http://rcgd.isr.umich.edu/. The Winter 2024 Series was co-sponsored by the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program (EHAP) at the University of Michigan.